


Cry For Yesterday

by orphan_account



Series: Yesterday [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: AU Slade and Ollie knew each other before the Island, Arrow Kink Meme, I don't know what I'm doing, M/M, Slade left, This is not my sandbox, homophobia mentions, kink meme fill, minor death/drinking/drugs mentions, they meet again on the island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 16:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1655186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slade and Oliver met in Starling City in 2004 and fell in love. Then he left and Oliver was shattered. They meet again on the Island.</p>
<p>Arrow Kink Meme fill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1: Starling City, 2004

**1: Starling City, 2004**

The kid was going through that awkward stage. The one all teenagers go through at some point, where they’re all elbows and knees and gangling limbs. Slade had not, initially, intended to spare him a second glance. It was a cold night and he was on his way back to the dingy little hotel room this end of the Glades, where he had heard gunshots and screaming at 3am just last night.

He had no intention of hanging around out here any longer than he had to.

There was something not quite right about the picture of the kid walking in the opposite direction, though. Slade was a man who had been trained to notice things that were out of place and pay attention to them, because that sort of thing could mean the difference between life and death in the long run. Slade looked at the kid again, taking note of the designer jeans and shoes and the heavy, expensive coat with some brand logo emblazoned on it. He didn’t fit with the crappy apartment blocks or the shitty 80s era cars with plastic bags duct-taped over broken windows or the garbage littering the street. There was something too clean and innocent about him. Yet his shoulders were hunched and his face was anguished as he walked and he seemed to know where he was.

Slade never really knew why he turned on his heel to follow the kid. He didn’t know if it was some latent parental instinct that he’d never had with Joe kicking in or what. He just knew the kid looked heartbroken and he was some idiot rich boy in the wrong part of town, and Slade had a bad feeling about the whole situation.

He tailed the kid for four blocks, and had just decided that he was going to head back when the kid pulled up short on a street corner and looked around, as if searching for someone. Who the Hell would he be meeting _here_ , of all places, though?

The kid dug in his pocket, pulling out a carton of cigarettes and a lighter, and settled in to wait while he smoked.

Slade had a sneaking suspicion he knew what for. Though, really, he could have done a _slightly_ better job of dressing-down. He was extremely conspicuous on his street corner, in his flash, clean clothes.

Slade forced himself to walk casually as he approached the kid.

“That will kill you, you know that don’t you?” he said.

He had not spoken particularly loudly, but he might as well have shouted in the kid’s ear the way he jumped like a startled rabbit, dropping the cigarette reflexively and spinning around to face him. For a second the kid stared at him, his expression one of nearly abject terror – so he _did_ know he was in a shady part of town, then – but then he seemed to realise that Slade was neither someone he knew nor carrying any obvious weapons, and it morphed into a sullen glare.

“Go away.”

Slade didn’t.

“What’s got you so eaten up, kid?” he asked. He was only partly curious – he didn’t really want to hear all about some random teenager’s woes. He’d had enough angst as a teenager himself to last him a lifetime. Still, he somehow got the impression that this kid needed some sort of friendly ear.

“What do you _want_?” the kid all-but-snarled at him.

“Maybe I fancied a bit of company.” He had just come off a long ten-month mission for ASIS near the Turkish border. His flight had arrived yesterday and he still had jetlag. He wouldn’t have minded someone to natter to.

“So go find a hooker,” the kid growled, though a hint of that fear came back into his eye – as if he thought Slade might force himself on him. “Because I’m not interested.”

Slade cocked his head. “What’s a rich kid like you doing all the way out here?”

Kid was definitely waiting for someone. He checked his watch, huffed irritably and folded his arms and looked like he wanted to dash across the road to get away from him.

“Well?” Slade prompted him.

He still didn’t leave, though. Instead, he said: “It’s none of your business. Now fuck off.”

Slade grinned lazily and leant against the streetlamp, knowing full-well that the kid could neither make him nor would he leave first. “I don’t know you, you don’t know me – you can tell me anything in confidentiality.”

The kid glanced at him sharply. “You don’t know who I am?”

“Should I?”

“Just about everyone in Starling City knows who I am.”

“I’m not from Starling City, though,” Slade replied. “My plane got in last night. This is my first time in the city.”

And that was all it took.

“Where are you from?” the kid asked.

“Australia. You couldn’t tell from my accent?”

Kid shrugged, averting his gaze. “I don’t know. I haven’t met anyone from Australia before. I figured you might have been some sort of really weird Canadian or something.”

Slade snorted. “A _Canadian_. So, kid. You were going to tell me what a rich kid like you is doing down here in the Glades,” he said.

Kid sighed. “My Dad has a steel factory not far from here.”

“And? Why are you here? Because you weren’t going there at this time of night.”

Another shrug. “I needed to get away for a while. Tommy and Laurel have started hooking up and they’re unbearable at the moment. Don’t get me wrong – Tommy’s my best friend, but…” The kid sighed.

“So you’re taking a walk in the most dangerous part of the city at eleven o’clock on what I’m fairly certain is a school night because your best friend is dating some girl?” Slade repeated, feeling mildly amused. God, had he been this illogical as a teenager?

“Well, yes,” the kid said, before contradicting himself. “I mean no. It’s more complicated than that.” He pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket and shook the carton open again.

“You even old enough to be smoking, kid?” Slade asked. “You don’t look like you’re shaving yet.”

“I shave!” the kid objected, hotly. “And anyway, I’m eighteen.” He looked around again. “Are you going to _leave_ already?”

“Why should I?” Slade asked, not entirely certain what the kid was going to buy whenever he met the person he was waiting for on this street corner but completely sure that whatever it was, it would be bad. The kid shifted from foot to foot anxiously. He had an idea. “Look,” he said. “Come with me. Tell me about your woes. I’ll buy you a drink. It’s cold out here.”

The kid stared at him. “But I’m eighteen,” he objected.

“So?” Slade asked, since he was fairly certain that whatever the kid was out here to do, it was less legal than underage drinking. “Legal drinking age in Australia _is_ eighteen. I’m assuming you have a fake ID.”

And that was how he ended up in a seedy bar in the Glades with Oliver Queen on a Wednesday night. Apparently the lure of a free beer was too much for an impressionable kid to pass up. Slade later wondered if he should feel guilty about this.


	2. 2: Starling City, 2004

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade and Oliver continue to get to know each other in Starling City, 2004.

**2: Starling City, 2004**

Oliver Queen, Slade mused later on, was an odd mixture of extremely stubborn and oddly… _malleable_.

After the kid got blind drunk on the Wednesday, Slade was left with the somewhat perplexing dilemma of what to _do_ with him. Oh, he could have bundled the kid into a cab and sent him off home – if he’d known where home even _was_ , though Oliver later told him that “Queen Mansion” would have cut it and the cabbie would have dropped him off at the right place. However, as he held the kid by the collar of his expensive coat to stop him toppling into the gutter as he retched, Slade made the decision that sending Oliver home drunk would probably only get the kid in trouble with his parents.

So he did the only thing he could think of, dog-tired from the jetlag as he was, where he could still be absolutely certain the kid would remain safe.

He took Oliver back to his hotel room in the Glades. By lunchtime, the kid was somewhat operational again, so Slade sent him on his merry way to school, never expecting to see him again – and certainly not come five o’clock that afternoon. Instead, just as he got out of the shower, there came a knock on his hotel door and when he went to open it he found himself face-to-face with none other than the same kid who had drunkenly pissed in his bed the previous night, necessitating a visit from housekeeping earlier on.

“What’re you doing back here?” Slade had growled, wearing nothing more than a towel around his waist, and Oliver had given him such a pathetic, kicked-puppy expression that he simply stepped aside and let him inside without another word. There, Oliver had sat down on the floor for lack of a table or desk, and proceeded to empty his book bag onto the grimy carpet and surround himself with sheets of homework.

Slade simply left him to it and unzipped his duffel bag to find a clean outfit that wouldn’t look wildly out of place in Starling City. Years in the military where he had lived in a tent with anywhere up to a dozen other men at a time and shared communal bathrooms and showers meant that he was not a particularly modest man. He dropped his towel without a second thought, paying Oliver no attention as he pulled on a pair of jeans. It was only as he shrugged into a button-down shirt that he became aware of the fact that Oliver was watching him intently.

“Rude to stare, kid,” he’d pointed out, without any heat at all, but Oliver had immediately flushed and looked away.

Slade sat down on the bed in the small hotel room and studied Oliver’s profile as he turned his attention to the homework spread out on the floor before him. He was a good looking kid with his shaggy, dirty blonde hair and his bright blue eyes. A minute later, it was Oliver’s turn to catch _Slade_ staring, as he turned his head to glance in Slade’s direction. If he noticed, though, he didn’t say anything.

Instead, he asked: “Hey, do you know where Algeria is? I’m pretty sure it’s in Europe, but I said that in class and my teacher looked at me like I’m an idiot and didn’t tell me whether I was right or wrong. I hate when people do that.”

As it happened, Slade had been in Algeria with ASIS for a mission three years ago. He knew _precisely_ where it was. “It’s in North Africa, kid. Between Morocco and Tunisia on the Mediterranean coast.”

On Thursday night, because the kid was still hanging around like a lost dog and Slade didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave, he took Oliver out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

There were no drinks afterwards. Slade had decided that early on, but Oliver didn’t seem to mind too much because he was still slightly hungover from the previous evening. Rather, they went back to Slade’s hotel room and had some of that crap coffee that comes in those little sachets that hotels always seem to provide.

At ten o’clock, when Slade suggested it might be time for Oliver to go home, he got another pained expression from the kid, followed by: “Can I stay here again tonight?”

Slade didn’t know why, but he relented. Might’ve been those blue eyes.

“Fine, but you’re sleeping on the floor.”

He still hadn’t forgiven drunk-Oliver for peeing on him.

The following morning, Slade nudged the kid awake with his foot and watched in mild amusement as Oliver panicked about being late. In his hurry, the kid slipped in the shower, swore loudly which let Slade know he would live, and came out five minutes later limping. Then he was gone, and Slade went off to meet with Billy Wintergreen at the pub.

Afterwards, he went for a run to stretch his legs and shake off the last of the jetlag, before going to check-in with his and Billy’s CO. He had dinner alone and didn’t get back to his hotel until eight o’clock on Friday night. When he’d arrived back, however, he found Oliver sitting outside the door, his head resting against the wood, his eyes closed, face pale – and unless Slade was sorely mistaken – tear-streaked.

“Don’t you have a home?” he asked, and watched in vague amusement as Oliver startled out of whatever reverie he’d been in.

“Yeah,” Oliver replied, getting to his feet. “My parents think I’m at Tommy’s, though.”

“And where does Tommy think you are?”

Oliver shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s with Laurel.”

So Slade let him in again.

The hotel room had a small television. Slade wasn’t really a TV sort of guy – too much of a waste of time for his taste – but it was a Friday night and Oliver clearly had no intention of settling down and doing homework again tonight when he had the whole weekend ahead of him to do that in. The cable package supplied was pretty crap, but Oliver managed to find _The Matrix_ on one of the channels. There was no couch or chairs, just the double bed, so they both ended up sitting side-by-side with their backs pressed against the headboard and their arms touching.

During the ads, they talked.

“So what’s going on with you and Tommy, then?” Slade asked.

Oliver glanced at him, then looked determinedly back at the TV. “It’s hard to explain.”

“I’ve got all night. Try me.”

So Oliver told him. About how he was in love with his best friend, Thomas Merlyn, but Tommy didn’t know – and anyway, Tommy was a pussy man through-and-through. This led on to how he was gay and he was utterly terrified of telling his father, who made ridiculing comments about “faggots” whenever they were in the newspaper or on TV. At some point, Slade muted the movie so he could focus entirely on Oliver.

The kid genuinely had no one he could talk to.

His best friend was ignoring him in favour of the pretty new girlfriend, who he would no doubt soon break up with anyway. He was afraid of his father. His mother didn’t understand. She kept giving him that disappointed look, especially when one of his teachers rang home to say he’d picked another fight at school, or failed another test. And his sister was just a little girl.

“I can’t do _anything_ right,” Oliver said bitterly, staring at his hands. He sighed. “My SAT scores were really bad. Dad’s furious. He says he’s going to have to _pay_ someone to let me into college, now.”

“I never went to college,” Slade mused.

Oliver glanced at him in surprise. “You didn’t? But you know so _much_.”

Slade had sort of helped him with some of his homework yesterday. He shrugged. “You pick up things here and there in adult life. You’d be surprised.” Like geography and a certain amount of mathematics, which were required for navigation. He kept up-to-date on world affairs – particularly the ones that could lead to war, so he knew about those too. Enough chemistry to know how to make something explode. Biology, from hunting and killing animals for his own dinner – or evading the predators.

He didn’t know shit about literature or history, though. Whatever. A guy couldn’t know _everything_ and literature and history just weren’t practical.

Oliver sighed again, then sniffed, his eyes shining. Whatever was running through his head in that moment was undoubtedly negative. Slade watched him bite his lip, and felt the strange desire to _comfort_ the kid.

He didn’t think as he reached out to take the kid by the chin and look him in the eye. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m so _lonely_ ,” Oliver replied.

Slade never knew who initiated the kiss. He just knew that one moment he was brushing away the tear that Oliver tried so hard to blink back and the next their lips were locked together. For several seconds he couldn’t think of anything beyond tangling his fingers in that soft blonde hair and the kid’s lips – and then he came back to himself and pushed the kid away.

“I’m sorry,” he growled. “I should not have done that.”

“ _Why_?” Oliver asked, and he had a hurt, angry expression on his face. “I’ve _seen_ you looking at me. I can tell you like what you see.”

Slade thought about that a moment and realised had no _real_ answer apart from the fact that Oliver was a bolshy little shit, except all that did was make him all the more endearing.

“You know what? I don’t know.”

So he kissed Oliver again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oliver seems to be channelling the essence of Jesse Pinkman (kicked-puppy!) but w/e teenagers are angsty.


	3. 3: Starling City, 2004

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver goes tharn.

**3: Starling City, 2004**

Slade had things to do in Starling City, so it was a good thing that Oliver had to disappear off to school every day. It gave him eight or nine much-needed hours to get things done. Every other night, Oliver stayed either at Tommy’s or his parent’s place. The afternoons found them together.

Slade taught him to dress down to avoid being recognised – since he was apparently such a well-known face here in Starling.

Over the two months Slade was in Starling, they went places together, usually on the weekends. They went to the cinema. They saw one of the last showings of _The Bourne Supremacy_ where they shared popcorn and Slade had to bite his tongue during the action sequences but Oliver seemed to enjoy it. He accompanied Oliver to a football game, somewhat reluctantly, and spent the entire game comparing it to rugby, which he used to play with the boys back in Australia after school.

One time, they got their pictures taken in one of those photo booths. They ended up with a couple of identical strips of photos, and Oliver was making stupid faces in all of them.

Most of the time, though, they simply stayed in Slade’s hotel room. Oliver was lively and playful in short bursts before he fell back into introspective silences.

“Laurel told me that ‘mopey’ is my default,” Oliver muttered one afternoon as he lay on his back with his head on Slade’s chest.

“I’d say she’s about right, then,” Slade agreed, running his fingers through the kid’s hair.

Oliver rolled over, onto his belly, so he could look Slade in the eye. “Do you mind?”

Slade shook his head. “Nah, kid. I don’t. You’d be annoying if you were high on life all the time.”

Oliver didn’t seem reassured. “Tommy said I’m depressing to hang around.”

“Ah.”

Oliver laid his chin on his arm and began to trace patterns on the sheets with his finger. “Apparently I’m boring,” he muttered. “I never want to do anything.”

Slade glanced at him. “Some of us are old and tired and can’t keep up with you as it is.”

Oliver sighed and rolled off the bed. “I need to do my homework.”

“Okay. Now you really are being boring.”

“I know, but I got a D on my last English essay and I really need to read this before Monday.” Oliver was rooting through his book bag before pulling out a novel that he didn’t even appear to have cracked the spine of yet.

He really was extremely worried about his grades. Slade had watched him attempt to do homework on more than one occasion – seen the way he sat down full of determination and then gave up after ten minutes because it was too difficult and he was getting frustrated.

“What’re you reading, then?” Slade asked.

“ _Catch-22_ ,” Oliver replied. He glanced hopefully at Slade. “Have you read it?”

Slade shook his head. “Sorry kid. I never really was one for reading. What’s it about?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get into it. The language is really confusing. I think it’s about World War II though,” Oliver said.

“Pass it here.”

Between them, reading aloud to each other, they read the book cover-to-cover in a single weekend. When he wrote the essay about it at school the following week, Oliver got a B-.

Three weeks after they met, they fucked for the first time. The kid was a virgin and he mewled like a new-born kitten beneath Slade’s tongue and fingers and cock and afterwards they lay in a tangle of sated limbs. Oliver smiled contentedly and pressed his nose into the crook of Slade’s neck. Slade buried his nose in Oliver’s hair, which smelt of sweat and coconuts from whatever shampoo it was he used, and inhaled deeply, his chest aching with a somewhat foreign feeling that he had never experienced when he was with Adeline, his ex.

Perhaps it was because she never displayed the same outright devotion to him that this kid did. Perhaps it was because she’d been a hard, jaded bitch. Maybe it was because she knew the truth about him where Oliver did not. Whatever the case, he had always felt a vague sense of unease when he was with her. Not so with Oliver, who was so open and innocent and trusted him implicitly.

Long before Oliver sleepily murmured the words: “I love you,” in Slade’s ear he had realised he was in deep with the kid.

Similarly, he knew long before Oliver did that they could never work out. He was thirty-six. Oliver had just turned eighteen and was in his senior year at high school. Hell, the kid was still in the closet around his friends and family, who genuinely had no idea where he disappeared to all the time. Sometimes, Slade tailed Oliver when he went out to meet up with his friends on a Saturday afternoon. He kept a silent eye on the kid as he drank and smoked pot with Tommy late in the evening in the park. Oliver knew he was there, Slade made no effort to hide himself, but he never mentioned it later on.

He seemed to be wholly over his crush on his best friend. They laughed together, ribbed each other about chicks at their school and who they’d like to bang, and Oliver gave no indication of the other life he led.

Other days, Oliver and Tommy went out with Laurel, often eating in fancy restaurants, throwing around money and booze. Laurel was a fairly serious young woman, and Slade watched her reign Tommy and Oliver in on more than one occasion.

It was strange the way the kid was an entirely different person around these people – until he crashed. Suddenly his ability to act would desert him, his body language would change, his face would fall and he would become _distracted_ , for lack of a better word. Then Tommy and Laurel would go off and do something without him, still chatting and laughing and Oliver would sigh and find somewhere to sit down and play _Snake_ on his phone while he waited for them. Or else he would wander over to Slade and they would leave, if Tommy and Laurel completely ditched him.

“What’re you thinking about?” Slade asked him one evening as they walked through the Glades back to the hotel, after Tommy went off with Laurel to go to some party that Oliver didn’t feel much like attending.

Oliver shrugged, staring at his shoes. “I don’t know. It’s hard. I wish I could tell them the truth.”

But he couldn’t because of his father. Slade already understood that quite clearly, and he didn’t press the issue.

They were cutting down a narrow, little-used one-way street between warehouses. Oliver’s shoulders were hunched, his hands deep in his pockets. There was no one else around except for a man in a red parka on the other side of the street, wearing a beanie and sunglasses. Slade glanced at him once or twice, but didn’t pay him much attention until he crossed to their side of the street.

“Hey,” the guy said, as they drew nearer the intersection. “Wait up a second. You’re that Queen kid, aren’t you?”

Oliver’s shoulders were nearly level with his ears and he was determinedly not paying the man any attention. He kept walking without looking around.

“Piss off, mate,” Slade advised the man.

He froze when he heard the click of a safety switch being flicked off. Oliver obviously hadn’t known what the sound was, but he did look around.

Slade’s mother had read him _Watership Down_ when he was a child, and there was one thing that had stuck with him right through to this day. The idea of going _tharn_. In the book, a rabbit caught in headlights would become paralysed with fear or confusion. He’d seen soldiers do something remarkably similar on the battlefield when they were confronted with the full horrors of war, and he saw Oliver do it now with a gun in his face.

“Gimme your watch, phone and wallet,” the man with the gun said, pressing the muzzle of the gun into Slade’s back.

Slade did what came naturally.

He spun around, disarmed the man, put him on the ground and fired a bullet point-blank between the mugger’s eyes before he even had time to think.

Oliver was still _tharn_ , his gaze following the gun, which was now in Slade’s hands.

“Come _on_ , kid,” Slade growled, grabbing him by the scruff of his neck and propelling him along the street. “We’ve got to _move_.”

Slade altered their course so they were heading for the port, where he disassembled the pistol and dropped the different pieces of the gun into the water every hundred meters. Then he took Oliver back to the hotel, where the kid was sick in the hallway. Slade called housekeeping as soon as they got through the door.

God damn, that was probably the first time Oliver had ever seen a person die, and Slade had killed them _in front of him_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got my first cell phone in 2004. It was black and white and all I could do was text and call. It had 3 games on it. Space Invaders, Snake and another one that I can't remember. Those were the years.
> 
> I've seen people and animals go tharn IRL. This actually happens. I don't know why more people don't talk about it.


	4. 4: Starling City, 2004

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade has a realisation that he does not want.

**4: Starling City, 2004**

Oliver cowered away from Slade’s touch, that expression of fear he hadn’t worn since the first night they met back on his face. His eyes were wild, panicked, and he backed up into the corner by the bed. He was like a frightened animal regarding a much larger and infinitely more dangerous predator, his breathing sharp and fast.

He was going to faint in a minute if he kept that up, though.

Slade backed away and sat down on the floor.

“Kid,” he began, not looking at Oliver directly but instead out of the corner of his eye – like he might if he were going to approach a wary dog or horse. It was less threatening than staring. “You should sit on the bed and put your head between your knees.”

“… What?” Oliver asked, sounding strangled.

“You’re hyperventilating. Sit down, stick your head between your knees and count to ten. Now.”

He spoke softly, _gently_ even. Growling at the kid wouldn’t do anything but harm right now.

Oliver glanced at him with distrust written all over his face, but he did as he was told, clutching at his knees with white-knuckled fingers. “This isn’t helping,” he complained, after a moment.

“Did you count to ten?” Slade asked.

“Yes.”

“Then do it again. More slowly this time. Come on, I’ll count with you. Breath in until five, then out until ten. And repeat. Right – one, two, three…” Slade got up and moved to sit on the bed beside him. Oliver was so focused on the task at hand and listening to Slade count that he forgot to be scared of Slade’s presence, which he was thankful for.

Slowly, Slade reached out to touch Oliver’s shoulder, and when the kid didn’t flinch away from him he began to rub soothing circles on his back. Eventually he calmed down, shifting position so he was laying down on the bed on his side with his back to Slade.

“I feel sick,” Oliver muttered. He was still trembling, but his breathing had evened out.

“Yeah, that happens,” Slade admitted.

The kid sighed. “Why did… why did you do that?”

 _He was a threat_.

 _He would have killed you_.

 _It was instinctual_.

Slade had no real answer to give Oliver, so he didn’t reply.

Oliver buried his face in the pillow. Slade knew he didn’t go to sleep, then, because he was far too tense, but he seemed to be pretending to be. Perhaps to avoid further conversation or perhaps because he was thinking and wanted to concentrate completely. Slade couldn’t tell.

“I’m going to have a shower,” he announced, climbing off the bed. “You going to be all right here by yourself for a minute, kid?”

Oliver made a mumbling sound that Slade took for acquiescence and nodded, so he stripped and headed through to the bathroom. In the shower, Slade washed his hands and arms thoroughly with soap and a nail brush. Ideally he should have used a pumice stone to strip away a layer of skin from his hands, to be absolutely certain of getting rid of all of the possible GSR, but he didn’t have one with him and he wasn’t about to go and buy one.

Tomorrow he’d visit the Laundromat and wash the clothes he’d been wearing tonight with a pint of bleach.

Ideally he would’ve disposed of the body, too, only he couldn’t. Not when he had Oliver with him. Without Oliver, he might have removed its teeth, smashed the face in, cut off the fingers and then dumped it in an inlet somewhere just out of town. The fingers and teeth he would have scattered – no more than one finger to a dumpster, or two teeth to a garbage bin, throughout the rest of the city, to make it as difficult as possible to ID the body.

As it was, he was just going to have to let the SCPD find the corpse and deal with it and hope there had been no witnesses.

And there hadn’t been – except for Oliver.

Slade stood under the lukewarm water in the tiny hotel shower and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and considered the gigantic clusterfuck that was this situation. He needed to speak to Oliver. Make sure the kid wouldn’t speak.

So he got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his waist and headed back out into the room. The kid had kicked off his shoes and thrown his jacket on the floor and was now curled up under the covers. Slade padded over and sat down beside him.

Oliver didn’t stir, which was what let Slade know that he was still awake and making a pointed attempt to ignore him.

“Kid,” Slade murmured, resting his hand on Oliver’s shoulder.

“… Yeah?” He didn’t move, simply spoke into the pillow.

“What’re you thinking about right now?” Slade was fairly certain he knew, but he wanted to hear the kid voice it.

“Where did you learn how to do stuff like that?”

“Another life,” Slade replied, which was true enough. He’d been working extremely hard to keep his work and what he did with Team 7 and the ASIS from Oliver, so much so that he felt like he really was living two lives sometimes. The life where he went out and risked his neck and often ended up killing other men, and the other life – the free, loving life he shared with Oliver, where he spent his days revelling in the joy the kid’s presence brought him.

Oliver rolled onto his back and looked at Slade, and his expression was no longer fearful. Instead, he looked sad.

“You never tell me the truth,” he said. “Why?”

Slade inhaled sharply. “I can’t, kid. Just drop it, for your own good.”

Oliver regarded him for a long moment, his eyes sparkling. “What are you going to do now, Slade?”

Slade glanced at his watch. It was gone ten o’clock at night. He needed to speak with his handler. He also needed to ensure Oliver’s silence.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, rather than answering Oliver’s question.

Oliver bit his lip and looked away.

“I won’t,” he whispered.

Slade believed him.

He got dressed, flicked off the light so Oliver could get some shut-eye if he could, and stepped out into the hotel hallway as quietly as possible, locking the door behind him. Then he headed outside and down the street until he found a quiet location as far away from any other people as possible and pulled out his cell phone to dial his ASIS handler here in the States.

He gave the man a quick rundown of the situation, stating in simple terms that he had killed a man in the Glades in self-defence at that he was fairly certain that he had eliminated all of the evidence that might lead back to himself, although due to the location and his current lack of transportation he’d had to leave the body where it was. Suffice to say, the guy wasn’t happy and Slade just about got his ear chewed off.

“ _Wintergreen told me about your little distraction,_ ” his handler snapped down the line. “ _I think it’s time you ended it. Clearly, you aren’t on top of your game right now._ ”

Slade snarled wordlessly and ended the call.

Rather than heading back to the hotel furious, where he ran the risk of snapping at Oliver, he walked aimlessly around the Glades until midnight had been and gone. As he walked, he realised that his handler was correct – he needed to break things off, now, before things got too messy and he hurt the kid in one way or another.

 _Dammit_.

The kid was too innocent, and he’d already seen far too much. If he spent any more time around Slade, he’d almost inevitably see something else. Something worse. That would lead to more fearful glances, more questions that he couldn’t answer. Eventually it would become too much. It always did. And Slade didn’t want that for Oliver. Far easier to break things off now than to put the kid through that long, slow period where he questioned everything Slade did, where he never knew the truth, where he wondered whether every dead body reported in the newspaper had been dropped by his lover.

It would be even worse when Slade left on another mission and he couldn’t tell the kid the reason, but sooner or later he was going to get his orders and he would have to leave again and that would be that. He might be gone for months at a time.

Sooner or later Oliver would get sick of being lied to at every turn, sick of doubting everything in his life, sick of living in a state of fear, and he would break it off.

No, it was better this way.

Slade wiped at his eyes, glad Billy wasn’t here right now, and headed back to the hotel.

He unlocked the door nearly silently and stepped inside, pausing to listen to Oliver’s soft, even breaths.

The kid was asleep.

Slade unlaced his boots and kicked them off before slipping into bed beside him. Oliver woke up and murmured: “You took a really long time.”

“I needed to clear my head,” Slade replied.

“Hm. ‘Kay.”

The kid snuggled up against his side, laying his head on Slade’s chest, and went back to sleep with a sigh. He was too damn trusting, in spite of what he’d just seen. Slade’s throat constricted and his resolve wavered when he realised just how much he loved the kid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because Slade's job requires him to deal with inconvenient corpses in an urban environment from time-to-time, I'm sure.
> 
> OR ELSE HE'S A SECRET SERIAL KILLER.


	5. 5: Starling City, 2004

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade leaves.

**5: Starling City, 2004**

“I have to go,” Slade said one Saturday morning, a couple of weeks later.

Ollie, who was sitting on the toilet seat with his knees drawn up to his chest, watched him, anxiety gnawing in his gut. Ever since the incident with the mugger, Slade had been really distant. He didn’t touch Ollie as much, didn’t run his fingers through Ollie’s hair absently when they lay side-by-side on the hotel bed and he read those odd files that appeared to be in code or something and Ollie watched TV or texted Tommy or Laurel or McKenna. He didn’t initiate any of their interactions anymore, though when Ollie started something he certainly followed through.

And now this.

Ollie had done what Slade said, though. He hadn’t said a thing. To anyone. Not to Tommy. Not to Laurel. Not to Detective Lance who he overheard moaning about a murder case down in the Glades that he couldn’t get any leads on. Not to his sister. Not to his parents. Not to the school guidance counsellor. Not even to Slade himself.

He diligently kept his mouth shut, even when he woke up screaming at night from the nightmares of the dead man’s accusing eyes and his Mom came into the room and asked him what was wrong. He just said he didn’t remember, or made up lies. Even kept his mouth shut when he was sure he was going mad, when all he wanted to do was throw up or cry or just _run_ and he was never quite sure which it was.

“Where?” Ollie asked, cocking his head. “When will you be back?”

Slade stopped shaving, putting his dinky little plastic razor down in the sink, and sighed before turning to face him. “Oliver,” Slade began, and he was using that serious tone of voice. That one that wasn’t unique to Slade. Just about all the adults in Ollie’s life used that tone when they wanted to convey some message and they wanted him to pay attention to what they were saying. His mother had used it to tell him his grandma had died two years ago.

Ollie immediately felt a plunging sensation in his chest, and he wondered if he was going to suffocate.

“I’m leaving Starling tomorrow,” Slade said. “And I won’t be coming back.”

“… _Why_?” Ollie hated the way his voice sounded strangled as he spoke.

Slade shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his forefinger and inhaling deeply with his eyes shut, as if he was searching for the patience to speak without shouting. He did that sometimes when Ollie was being particularly annoying, but this time it was couple by a swallow.

“I’ve got places to be,” Slade said at length.

Ollie’s eyes stung. “What about me?”

“It was nice while it lasted,” Slate replied. “You were a good lay. Thanks.”

Ollie bit his lip, confused. “But I thought—”

Suddenly, Slade was angry, his dark eyes flashing. He seemed so much larger when he was mad, like he filled the entire hotel bathroom, and Ollie shrank away from him, feeling his heart hammering. “You thought _what_ , kid? That this was anything more than a casual fling? I live in a _hotel_.”

Ollie felt like an idiot. Remembered all the times he had said he loved Slade, and Slade had smiled indulgently but hadn’t said he loved him back. Had he been stringing him along the entire time?

God, he was such a fool.

“Never mind,” Ollie said, averting his gaze and making himself as small as possible.

Slade finished shaving, washed the shaving cream from his face and stalked out of the bathroom. Ollie sat on the toilet seat for several minutes while he tried to compose himself. When he was certain he wouldn’t cry, he went out and picked up his book bag and the various things he had left around the hotel room over the previous couple of months. Then he left.

He spent the day down by the pier, smoking.

He did not go to the hotel room the following day to say goodbye. Instead, he called Tommy up to see what he was doing and the two of them went out on the town and ended up snorting lines off some model’s washboard flat stomach. He stumbled home drunk a little after one o’clock in the morning and was caught by his mother.

He was a moron for thinking Slade would ever care about him. He was just another fag. A stupid, pathetic, misguided fag, like his Dad said.

Ollie didn’t go to school that Monday. He told his mother he was sick. Given that she had been the one to catch him coming in that morning, she knew this was not true, but she raised no objections. Simply looked at him with that disappointed expression again and left him alone to wallow in his own misery. That was good – that was how he preferred it.

That afternoon he curled up on the couch in his room, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and considered his life. Raisa brought him plain toast and orange juice a little after four o’clock, but he didn’t touch it until sometime after dinner, which he did not attend. While he sat there, he made several crucial decisions that would shape his life to come.

He was not going to be gay. He _wasn’t_. He would do whatever he could to be like Tommy. Because Tommy, for all that he seemed to date a different girl every week, was happy.

Everyone’s expectations of him were already incredibly low. He’d been trying to be better, for everyone, his entire life. To earn the respect of his Dad. But he was never going to actually get it because he was just an idiot. He sucked at school. He knew he sucked at school, his parents and teachers all knew he sucked at school, he didn’t know why he even bothered anymore. So fuck it. He was giving up.

A few weeks later, he actually slept with a woman for the first time. She was the first of many, though after Tommy broke it off with Laurel she and Ollie started hooking up fairly regularly.

He partied.

He drank.

He did whatever drugs he and Tommy could get their hands on.

Soon he was the life of the party. Tommy had trouble keeping up with him – he could easily drink his best friend under the table after a while. Tequila was their poison of choice. Laurel still caught him moping sometimes, on quiet mornings after the parties were over and everyone else was sleeping it off but Ollie couldn’t drop off, he was too restless, so instead he sat by the window and watched the encroaching dawn.

His parents loathed the new personality he was cultivating. His grades dropped to new lows. His father made the college of his choice a generous donation before he was accepted. He joined a frat house and only attended class once or twice a week.

At the end of his first semester, he was put on academic probation because of his low GPA. At the end of the second semester, they asked him to leave.

He made his way through another three Ivy League colleges, getting kicked out of them all in one way or another. He was arrested and wound up in court for various reasons – for assaulting a member of the paparazzi, for peeing on a cop, for stealing a taxi. Tommy thought these were excellent adventures, but Ollie felt empty.

He didn’t mention this to anyone.

And for the entire four years, between the day where Slade left Starling City and the fateful day where he set foot on the _Queen’s Gambit_ , he never forgot the dark-haired, dark-eyed Australian man who had taken his heart, and his virginity, and then left him behind, feeling like complete and utter shit.

For some reason he never threw out that strip of photo booth pictures, though. Instead, he kept them, and when he was feeling melancholy he took it out and looked at it and tried to imagine what it would be like to be as happy as he looked in those little black-and-white squares, next to Slade.

Then Laurel suggested they get an apartment together and he panicked and got on the boat with Sara and his Dad and the _Queen’s Gambit_ sank in a storm on the North China Sea.

Ollie watched his Dad shoot the other crew member in the lifeboat and he didn’t go _tharn_ this time – Slade had told him about _tharn_. He listened in disbelief as his Dad asked him to right his wrongs, confused and scared because he didn’t know what was going on, and then he howled in shock and the sudden realisation of his aloneness when his father shot himself in the head.

Days later, he washed up on the beach of the Island.

He still had that strip of photos tucked into his shirt pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I just want to address this.
> 
> I don't know if anyone else who watches Arrow has noticed this but Slade. Talks. Really. Fucking. Slowly. And. He. Enunciates. Every. Word. Really. Carefully. And. I. Just. Want. To. Say. That. Australians. Don't. Talk. Like. That. In. Real. Life.
> 
> I imagine it's something they got Manu Bennett to do deliberately on the show so the American audience could understand wtf he was saying. Or maybe he just talks really weird. Because MOST of us who live down here are actually really terrible speakers irl. We slur our words together and drop letters so you just get this kind of jumble of vowels that was actually a sentence. Yagedsommeingthasoundsabihloikthis. Sound that out loud fast and I swear to God this is how we speak.
> 
> We do not speak like Slade Wilson on Arrow because. He's. Way. Too. Careful. With. Every. Word. He. Says. To my ear is actually sounds like he's developmentally delayed or something, or attempting to drunkenly over-pronounce, the way he talks real careful-like.
> 
> /rantover


	6. 6: Lian Yu, 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade runs into Oliver on Lian Yu. He is... surprised.

**6: Lian Yu, 2007**

He knew the moment that he stepped back into the clearing where the fuselage of the downed plane lay that there was someone else here. Slade had been out checking the snares for small game, and he had a couple of wood hens. When he realised he was not alone, however, he dropped them into the grass and slipped into a low crouch, every sense alert.

He moved swiftly, silently, like the predator he was, scaling the side of the fuselage and onto the roof. He spotted the intruder – one of Fyers’ men, he assumed. He noted only distantly that he wasn’t wearing his ski mask, had it stuffed in his pocket instead, before he saw his opening. The man, who had shaggy light brown hair, had his back presented to him, so he took the opportunity, drawing his sword and leaping lightly down into the fuselage.

“Twitch, and I will open your throat,” he snarled, grabbing the man from behind and pressing his sword to the man’s jugular. That was odd – Fyers’ men usually had slightly better reflexes than that. He ignored this fact, however, in favour of getting more information from the intruder. “How many more are with you?”

He gave the man a shake, to reiterate his threat.

But the intruder just gasped, bewildered, and said: “What?”

“You have ten seconds to tell me something I believe before I cut out your voice box,” Slade growled in his ear.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the intruder said, sounding slightly strangled. “Yao Fei sent me here and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t so you could kill me.”

It was Slade’s turn to pause, and utter a somewhat bemused: “What?”

He let the intruder go, spinning him around and pointing his sword threateningly at the man’s chest.

“Yao Fei,” the intruder began, then paused, an expression of intense confusion crossing his face. He frowned, cocking his head. “Slade?”

Slade kicked the man’s legs out from under him, even as he recognised the intruder. He was older now. Taller. No longer that gangly teenager, he’d filled out, grown scruff on his chin. His hair was longer, ragged. He was dirty. If Slade had to guess he’d been on the Island some months already. But his eyes were the same – he was giving him the same damn kicked-puppy expression as he did the last time they had seen each other.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Slate asked.

“Yao Fei,” Oliver said. “He gave me directions to your… plane.”

As if that explained everything.

“No,” Slade said, amending himself. “On the Island.”

A shadow passed over Oliver’s face. “Shipwrecked,” he muttered, sitting up and turning away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Slade slipped his sword back into its sheath, and while Oliver wasn’t looking he surreptitiously pinched himself on the thigh to make certain that this was real and not some sort of fucked up nightmare. But he was awake, and somehow the two parts of his life he had tried to keep separate had collided and mated and produced _this_.

He had been extremely careful to never let Oliver know about his work with the ASIS. Oliver had been young and impressionable, naïve and mostly innocent of the cruelties of the real world. Oh, the kid had run upon a few of them by himself – bigotry and harsh words and the idea of a bleak, tedious future. But nothing like the visceral realities that Slade faced daily.

And now Oliver was here. On Lian Yu. Dirty, scruffy, wearing a haunted expression. Slade didn’t know where he’d run across that uniform, but he suspected that the prospect of continued existence for its previous wearer was low.

The kid glanced at him sharply, then. “What are _you_ doing here though, Slade?”

Slade grunted. “This island was a Chinese prison—” he began.

“I know,” Oliver interrupted him. “Fyers told me.”

Slade gave him a flat, unimpressed stare. Oliver set his jaw and glared back at him.

“Why are you here, Slade?” Oliver repeated. “It’s not every day you run into your ex on a desert island.”

“I’m trying to get off the island, evidently,” Slade replied. “Come here.”

He showed the kid the map, pointing out their current location and the location of the airstrip. He told Oliver about the regular supply drops, that this was the way off the island. Told him about how he and Yao Fei had been watching the place for months – but then Yao Fei was compromised. Oliver didn’t ask any further questions, simply nodded and paid attention, his expression alert but confused. Terribly confused, like he couldn’t quite believe he was having the conversation he was with the person he was having it with.

“Yao Fei must have sent you because he knew I couldn’t take the air strip alone,” Slade mused, looking the kid up and down and trying to assess whether he would be an asset or a liability in the field. He went over to one of the supply crates and withdrew a short Japanese sword, which he handed to Oliver.

They sparred. Oliver wouldn’t fight back, so he knocked the kid out and tied him up, wondering vaguely what to do with him. He didn’t need a useless hanger-on and he couldn’t work out why Yao Fei would have sent Oliver in his direction.

While Oliver was out he pawed through the kid’s pockets, pulling out a leather-bound notebook with a list of names in it, the shred of map Yao Fei had marked out the location of the plane on, a pebble veined with quartz that the kid must have picked up at some point, possibly off the beach, a small spiral sea-shell also from the beach, and a couple of dried-up dandelion flower heads.

Then he found the photos. The first was a little picture of a girl. Laurel. Slade recognised her. She was older than he remembered her, more mature-looking, but he never forgot a face. It was a remarkably well preserved picture, for all that it had been submerged in sea water and river water more than once and carried in Oliver’s pocket for who-knew-how-many months.

The second photo was not a singular photo but rather a strip of photos from a photo booth, so faded now it was becoming difficult to make out who was in them. Slade was somewhat startled to see his own face staring up at him from them, though, smiling. Happy.

The strip of photo booth pictures was worn around the edges, smudged and discoloured by the oil from Oliver’s fingers, had obviously been carried – treasured? – for far longer than the image of Laurel had.

Slade swallowed and tucked the various items back into Oliver’s pockets, feeling inexplicably guilty.

When Oliver came to a couple of hours later he learned that the kid was just as stubborn as ever – and angry, too, when he realised what had happened. He dislocated his own wrist in order to slip the bonds Slade had put him in and came up swinging, clocking Slade in jaw.

Slade figured he deserved it, for everything he’d done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finished writing this and I'll post the final two little scenes/chapters/what-have-you tomorrow.


	7. 7: Lian Yu, 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade and Oliver set out for the airstrip.

**7: Lian Yu, 2007**

Ollie couldn’t believe it. And even if he could’ve believed it, he couldn’t understand it.

_How_ was Slade Wilson here.

_Why_ was he here?

It didn’t make any sense.

He had had enough of feeling like an idiot back in school. Out partying with Tommy? No one treated him like he was some sort of moron. Except maybe his Dad, only his Dad had given up the whole effort of trying to get him to behave through the use of disappointed stares and lectures when he was about twenty.

“What’s the point?” Ollie had heard Robert ask Moira one evening. “The boy will make his own mistakes.”

Sometimes, Ollie wished he had the guts to make the “mistakes” he longed to. Wished he was strong enough to come out as gay, so he could stop all this acting with the models and the girls with the large trust funds and the vapid-eyed young women who were only interested in him for his money.

Slade made him feel useless. Back when they were together before, he never used to do that. He used to be gentle, and caring, and thoughtful, even if he was sorta prickly. No one in his entire life had made Ollie feel more cared for. Now, though, he was different. His temper seemed to be perpetually short and he had no patience for failure. Which was a shame, because he was asking Ollie to try to become something that he inherently was not, so he failed. A lot.

Then there was the fact that Slade had been the partner of the man who tortured him. Ollie couldn’t get his head around that fact, and yet Slade was in possession of that black and orange mask that made chills run down Ollie’s spine and his heart gallop unpleasantly in his chest.

It was nightfall. Ollie was tired, cold, hurting and hungry. Slade had been busting his ass all day, making him run, spar, practice loading and unloading, disassembling and reassembling various firearms. There were blisters on his fingers and heels and toes and because it had been raining on and off sporadically all day he his clothes were damp through to the skin.

He knew he should do something about eating, but he was too tired and cold so while Slade disappeared off into the trees on some errand known only to himself, Ollie dragged himself back to the fuselage where he looked despondently at the cold ashes where Slade sometimes lit a fire.

Then, because he wasn’t an idiot – he _wasn’t_ , even if he was useless – and he knew that staying in damp clothing would only lead to hypothermia, Ollie stripped down to his underpants and crawled into the sleeping bag Slade had given him.

He didn’t know how many hours later it was when Slade woke him up. He just knew it felt like a long time had passed, and it was full dark, and there was a fire going.

“Come on, kid,” Slade grumbled at him. “Up you get.”

“Why?” Ollie whined. He wasn’t proud to admit that he whined, but that’s what he did. He was tired and he was still cold and his head ached and he just wanted to sleep.

Slade gave him an impatient look. “Do you want dinner, or not?”

“No,” Ollie replied, because he wasn’t hungry anymore. His stomach felt like it had knots in it. Suddenly, he had Slade’s hand in his face, and he started backwards. “What’re you doing?”

“Checking your temperature,” Slade said. “You better not be getting sick on me.”

“I’m not hot,” Ollie complained as Slade pressed the inside of his wrist against Ollie’s forehead. “I’m _cold_.”

Slade grunted. “You seem warm to me.”

To prove he wasn’t getting sick, Oliver forced himself out of bed and had some of the wood hen Slade had roasted over the fire. Slade made him drink a couple of cups of water with it, and then Ollie retreated back to his sleeping bag, his muscles groaning in protest at every movement and his teeth chattering.

Slade banked the fire and began to sharpen his sword. Ollie closed his eyes and was almost asleep again when Slade got to his feet and headed over to his own sleeping roll.

The following morning, Ollie woke up with the back of Slade’s large tanned hand pressed against his forehead, as opposed to the toe of Slade’s boot nudging him in the ribs. When he noticed Ollie was awake, Slade sat back on his haunches and regarded him seriously.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Fine,” Ollie replied, though they both knew he was lying.

Whatever he had, it was low-grade enough that it only interfered with his training mildly. Whatever it was, it lasted roughly three days and was characterised by running nose and eyes, sore throat, cough, and joint and muscle pain. There was probably mild fever, too, but they didn’t have a thermometer to check. Ollie toughed it out and refused to complain, though Slade kept asking him if he was sick. Usually when the man caught him wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve or sniffing or attempting to cough quietly in the night.

On the second day, Slade came down with whatever it was too and Ollie heard him grumbling under his breath about germ-ridden, snot-nosed brats.

“At least it’s not fucking malaria or cholera or Ebola,” Slade muttered one evening while they were sitting by the fire, four days before they had to leave for the airstrip. “Or Lyme’s disease. Though how the Hell you managed to catch a cold all the way out here without coming into contact with _anyone_ is beyond me. I’m warning you now. If you get dysentery, you’re looking after yourself…”

A day of the planned assault on the airstrip they set out early in the morning.

Ollie would’ve died within his first couple of hours alone. He stepped on a landmine. Then Fyers’ goons turned up and Slade disappeared into the undergrowth. He felt like howling against the unfairness of it all. But he didn’t. Instead he pulled on the black ski mask that was part of the uniform he’d stolen and did his best not to arouse the mercs’ suspicions – wondering, all the while, whether Slade had abandoned him for good or whether he was gonna come back.

Somehow, Ollie still found it surprising when Slade killed the three mercs in a matter of seconds using only a sword. Like some sort of modern-day ninja or something. He was even more surprised when Slade managed to get him off the mine with all his limbs intact. And then Slade helped him to his feet and was patting him down, looking for injuries.

Ollie yelped. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

Slade gave him a dark stare. “If you’re sure.”

They continued on their way.

That evening they camping in the lee of a fallen tree. Ollie spent longer than he cared to admit trying to get a fire going while Slade cleaned his rifle and made unhelpful comments about wolves. Then he pulled out a lighter that he’d had the whole damn time and lit the fire for Ollie, and that was just fucking awesome!

Later, after they had eaten, the night was well established and the fire was burning low. Ollie, in a fit of homesickness, pulled the picture of Laurel out of his pocket to look at her familiar features. He tried to imagine her sitting off to his left, Tommy to his right, the three of them happy and carefree and maybe slightly drunk, and he wished he’d just gotten the apartment with her, even if it would never have felt _right_ being with her.

“You’re going to wear that thing out just by looking at it,” Slade said, coming back from the silent patrol he had done around the perimeter of their camp and sitting down.

Oliver glanced at him but didn’t say anything.

“It’s Laurel, right?” Slade asked.

Ollie nodded.

“Thought she was into Tommy.”

“They broke up ages ago. Just after you left, actually,” Ollie replied. He sighed and tucked the picture back into his pocket, unable to maintain the illusion that he was back home any longer.

“Huh.” Slade didn’t say anything else for a while. “So you were with her…?”

Ollie nodded again. “Yeah.”

“Didn’t take you for a ladies’ man,” Slade said. “Not after—” And he cut himself off, as if he didn’t want to raise old memories. He changed tacks. “She’ll still be there when you get home, you know.”

“I doubt it,” Ollie said, snorting. “Remember how I told you I was shipwrecked? Her sister was with me when the boat went down.”

Slade raised his eyebrows. “That’s funny. I never took you as being a bad boy. You seem to lack the spine.”

Ollie stared at the forest floor, feeling a hotness travel up his neck and into his cheeks. He didn’t want Slade to think less of him, and yet… And yet it was inevitable. He’d been acting the fool for far too long back home, but it had taken ending up here for him to realise it. “I need to get home. Make things right.”

“If you think you can sleep with your girlfriend’s sister and still make it right you’re dumber than I thought,” Slade said.

Sometimes, Ollie hated this new Slade. He was a lot meaner than he remembered from Starling City. Maybe it was because their lives were in danger every day. Maybe it was because he’d been out here by himself with no one to talk to but himself for far too long, but his comments bit deep.

Ollie sighed and ran a hand over his eyes. “That’s not what I meant. I need to – I need to tell her the truth. Break it off for good. Laurel is – was – one of my best friends for years. And if she hates me, that’s okay. But I need to tell her the truth. I’ve treated her really badly, and it’s wrong.”

Slade regarded him silently for a long moment. “Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll wake you in a couple of hours and we’ll take the airstrip.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know. I can kinda imagine Slade being a worried mother hen, but then at the same time trying to pretend like he's not being a worried mother hen, and then Ollie just being real irritable about it because he don't want mothering.


	8. 8: Lian Yu, 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bridges are not mended, but an overture of peace is made.

**8: Lian Yu, 2007**

Taking the airstrip went well enough, but then Oliver refused to leave the Island without making at least an attempt to rescue Yao Fei.

Slade let him go when he realised that he might as well have been talking to a tree for all the good it was doing him. Oliver was stubborn in the same was a mule with a toothache was stubborn. When he got an idea in his mind, there was just no getting through to him. So Slade gave him the time limit and watched as he crashed off into the trees of the forest with all the grace and subtly of a giraffe on roller skates wearing a disco suit composed of flashing rainbow-coloured LED lights.

Oliver didn’t come back. Slade debated leaving him behind on Lian Yu, but in the end the idea left a sour taste in his mouth and a roiling feeling in his stomach. With a curse he set off to retrieve the kid.

His retrieval mission went – well, it was successful. He recovered Oliver, but they missed the plane and didn’t manage to rescue Yao Fei. And Slade ended up with a bullet in his arm that Oliver had to dig out.

The kid performed over and above the expected, though. When the wound on Slade’s arm became infected, Oliver set out for the other side of the Island, by _himself_ in spite of his ineptitude and the considerable danger to himself, to retrieve Yao Fei’s herbs. For Slade. Slade worried about him, kept an ear open when he wasn’t delirious from fever for the sound of gunshots in the distance, but heard nothing.

And by nightfall Oliver had returned – with the herbs. Mission successful. The kid had done it.

He mixed up an absolutely vile tasting tea for Slade, which Slade choked down to appease the kid, and by the following morning the fever was gone and the swelling in Slade’s arm had mostly abated. It looked like the kid hadn’t been lying about the properties of Yao Fei’s miracle herbs.

Slade had long been of the opinion that everyone was out for himself. The Island taught him that. Billy sure as Hell had been, in the end. Slade hardly cared about the mission anymore. He just cared about getting off Lian Yu. Only – he’d been unable to leave Oliver behind for some reason.

Anyway, if that was the truth then the kid was an enigma. First, he insisted on going back and attempting to rescue Yao Fei, at the risk of both failing to get off the Island and his own neck. Hell, he headed baldly straight into Fyers’ camp to attempt it. Then, when Slade was sick, he risked his own neck again to get him medicine. As he sat examining the healing wound in the morning light while Oliver was still sleeping, drooling a little, Slade came to the conclusion that perhaps there were people out there who were genuinely selfless.

And the idiot kid was one of them.

For some reason, that realisation raised a lump in his throat that he had to fight to swallow.

Oliver stirred, but Slade wasn’t ready to face the kid yet, so he headed outside to check the snares he’d set, which hadn’t been dealt with in days.

On his way back to the fuselage with a couple of rabbits and having reset the snares he noted the wind was picking up, scented rain on the wind, and felt the drop of atmospheric pressure in his ears and sinuses – all of which pointed towards an incoming low pressure system. Here in the North China Sea, that could mean anything from a small local storm to a typhoon to a freak blizzard.

When he arrived back at the plane he found Oliver awake and looking at a photo again. Not the picture of Laurel this time – rather the strip of pictures of the two of them. Oliver startled and shoved this strip of photos away when he realised Slade was there, and Slade didn’t mention it.

Instead, he dropped the two rabbits in front of the kids and said: “Fancy learning how to gut a bunny?”

Oliver made a disgusted face. “Yao Fei already taught me.”

From his expression, Slade could tell that field dressing rabbits was not a task that Oliver particularly enjoyed. Still, when Slade got back from collecting deadwood, he found Oliver crouched outside the fuselage with the knife, somewhat crudely butchering the rabbits.

There came a rumble of far-off thunder before it started to rain. Slade watched the kid glance up, a somewhat nervous expression on his face, before hunching his shoulders and carrying the skinned bunnies back inside the plane. Slade followed him in and dumped the firewood down by the door.

Later, after their breakfast of rabbit, Oliver started to fiddle with the broken radio and Slade set about cleaning and sharpening his sword. The storm worsened and more than once Slade watched Oliver look around fearfully at the sound of thunder. They spent the day in relative silence, listening to the sounds of the elements outside and trying to ignore the rain coming in through the holes in the roof and walls.

It got dark early and Slade retired shortly after they ate, still feeling the after-effects of the fever and infection. The storm raged into the night.

“No! _Sara!_ ”

He woke and his hand went for the blade he kept under his pillow even as he realised that on the other side of the fuselage Oliver had had a nightmare. That was all. A night terror. Slade watched in the dark as Oliver sat up and buried his face in his hands, stifling a broken sob. There came a flash of lightning, and on its heels a resonating crack of thunder, and Oliver startled. Slade was certain that if he’d been a dog he would’ve been hiding under the bed right now.

Oliver sobbed again, sniffed, dashed angrily at his face to wipe away tears that Slade couldn’t see. Slade felt vaguely voyeuristic, watching him in his grief, and he considered shutting his eyes and attempting to go back to sleep. But then there was another flash of lightning from almost directly overhead, and he saw Oliver clap his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut, as if he were trying to close out the world, even as he snivelled, and he understood that the kid didn’t actually need to be alone right now.

He needed _help_.

“Kid.”

No response.

“Oliver!”

Again nothing. The howling of the wind was too loud, the rain pelting against the fuselage. Oliver couldn’t hear him.

With a sigh, Slade slipped out of his sleeping bag and padded over to the space where Oliver slept. There, he dropped down into a crouch at Oliver’s side and reached out to lay a hand on the kid’s shoulder. Oliver jumped and lunged away from him – his reflexes were getting better. The look he gave Slade was wild-eyed, and Slade was quite sure that for a minute there the kid didn’t even recognise him.

Then: “Slade?”

“Hey kid,” Slade said, softly. “You want to talk about it?”

He’d noticed that Oliver didn’t reveal much to him anymore. Kept quite tight-lipped about his life in general, where before he had opened his entire heart to Slade. Slade supposed he deserved that. He’d hurt the kid, badly, when he left. So he wasn’t surprised when Oliver shook his head adamantly, sniffed, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve again.

Slade shifted from a crouch to a sit and patted the space beside himself in invitation. Oliver looked at him hesitantly, his beautiful blue eyes sparkling, and Slade smiled sadly.

“I won’t bite, kid.”

“You left,” Oliver said.

Slade pinched the bridge of his nose. “I had to. I had a mission. You cannot honestly tell me you would have understood if I up and disappeared for months – years – at a time and never told you where I was going. I’ve been here on Lian Yu a little over thirteen months now. You were a kid. A good kid. You didn’t deserve that.”

Oliver looked at him for a long moment, the tears streaking down his cheeks.

Further away now, there came another growl of thunder. Oliver glanced around fearfully, then crept like a kicked dog to Slade’s side. Slade wrapped his arm around the kid’s shoulders and pulled him tight, pressing a feather-light kiss to Oliver’s sweaty forehead.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I am too,” Oliver replied.

The following morning Slade woke up with Oliver’s head on his chest, his blonde hair tickling his nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay.
> 
> I'm going to be honest. I could've taken this prompt and run with it and given birth to something that was 100,000 words long and I would've done it in about a month. However, I've got this writing course I've just enrolled in, and I really need to focus on that. So I was constantly asking myself: "Do I need to write this scene, or can I leave it?" As a result, I ended up with an extremely streamlined little story.
> 
> But that's okay.
> 
> When I next find myself with little to do (this will probably be 6-8 months away, mind you) I may well end up writing a little sequel to this that deals with Shado and Mirakuru and the return to Starling City. So.
> 
> I've left it at a stage where things aren't perfect between Ollie/Slade, but they're starting to work on it.

**Author's Note:**

> I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING I NEVER WRITE ROMANCE PUT UP WITH IT BITCHES
> 
> HEY GUESS WHAT IT'S MULTI-CHAP
> 
> Characters might be sorta OOC. I'm not sure. This is hard.


End file.
